Power, Islamism, and the Crisis of Western Rationality
Islam turned away from the natural philosophers for a valid religious reason. The triumphant Ashari school believed that the trend of philosophy to see the world primarily through chains of cause and effect, as science and logic do, rules out an omnipotent Creator. How could the source of the world and its natural laws be ordered about and restricted by His creations? This, they ruled, is idolatry — worshipping a created thing, either the laws of nature which God created, or worse, worshipping human thought and making God subsidiary to it.
This has been a major issue taken up by serious thinkers outside of Islam. And it is not stuck in the past. Among many other moderns, C.S. Lewis criticized what he called “scientism,” the unscientific assumption that the present state of knowledge represents the last word in truth, and those who credential each other agree beyond all debate that religion and God are irrelevant to modern thought.
Religion in this American tradition deserves to be center stage in our celebration of America’s 250th year.
That mindset was shared by the Western diplomats and politicians who treated the growing Islamist movement as a laughable thing. Even after September 11, this dogma did not let go — think of Obama’s dismissal of ISIS as “the JV team.” Classic religion was for much of the elite a spent force, of antiquarian interest at best, or the realm of “bitter clingers.” Its devotees could be managed without breaking a sweat. They continue to misread the significance of Islamism’s worship of power, and so are played by the mullahs like puppets into behavior that in a saner age would be shunned as treacherous.
More darkly, as liberal ideology in the West collapsed before organized ideologues into the awarding of power to groups on totemic qualities of racial and sexual tribes, the Left has found itself greatly attracted to the Islamists. One might think this the least likely of alliances. Adherents of the most fashionable variants of sexualized political identity have been at the forefront of those demonstrating for the serial rapists and torturers of Hamas and the mullahs of Iran — when it is no secret that in every place where they hold power, they set off an auto da fe by stringing such folk up by crane and leave them hanging (Iran) or by pushing them off rooftops (Gaza). At the very least, their right to protest, even politely, like pro-Israel demonstrators, would not be tolerated for a moment, and they would end up slaughtered by the tens of thousands, as was the treatment we observed throughout Iran and in Hamas-held neighborhoods only a few months ago.
But alliance it is. Its little secret is that both the toxic mutation of Islamism and the post-rational Left (and, off in the corner, the mutant grievance party of ex-rightists as well) agree in seeing power as the only coherent thing to worship. True, the Left always pretends, like the liberal elite before them, that religion has been left behind. But they, like all human beings, must rely on premises and axioms that cannot be proved; they just pretend that their own principles are not as dependent on faith as those they deride.
And having thrown all rational considerations away in the death spiral of woke mythology and its clouds of lies, they recognize in the Islamists people essentially like themselves. They have done the same thing, just under the flag of a religion which they have stripped of rationality and heart. So, the Left mythologizers find they can just overlook the religion part of it for two reasons: they can smoothly shoehorn the Islamists in as just another oppressed ethnicity; and they see the Islamists overlook most everything rational, human, and spiritually compelling about religion just as they do.
What they do not understand is the confluence of religion and rationality that has resulted in the development of the politics of freedom, a free market, and free inquiry, each of which has yielded the best results of anything ever tried in human history. Because they do not understand it, because it reinforces their conviction that they need not measure up to any standard that they do not control, they do not try to measure themselves by how they contribute or despoil the civilization that has discovered that confluence. Left to chance, their furthering of civilization is a crap shoot. And since there are far more bad choices than good ones, just as there are far more wrong answers than right ones on a test, leaving it up to chance leads to ever-increasing civilizational entropy.
As in the Islamic world, medieval Christianity and medieval Judaism also wrestled with the deep and momentous issue of the right relation of rationality and humanism to the faith claims of religion. There were those like Aquinas and Albertus Magnus who developed profound approaches of how to integrate faith and reason. There were those like Johannes Reuchlin and Pico della Mirandola who embraced a religious humanism and found crucial insight and support in Jewish texts and Jewish teachers. But at the same time, there were those who fought science tooth and nail, and who did not shrink from torturing and burning those who disagreed with them and slaughtering or expelling those who held to different faiths.
In the medieval Jewish world, there were great philosophers and men of learning like Moses Maimonides, Levi ben Gershon, and Hasdai Crescas, who likewise saw a world in which faith and knowledge were intertwined, but others so opposed rationalism that they went as far as to go to the Inquisition to beg them to intervene and forcibly suppress their opponents.
Yet for all that, there was not the resounding turn away from philosophy and the project of integrating of science, humanities, and faith that took place in the wake of the expulsion of Averroes and the condemnation of his books in the early 13th century.
Yet here we are, after having built a civilization so free, so prosperous, so welcoming, that the rest of the world wants to leave its home and come here to have it for themselves. Here we are being told to throw it all away and embrace the irrational worship of capricious power, vindictively applied. To join the Jacobins, the Stalinists, the Nazis, and their power-worshipping forbears in bringing Western civilization down.
The old liberal elite, the mainline of American progressivism, placed themselves within the American story. The American religious tradition had its place for them — think of the photo of FDR singing a hymn in the shipboard service held when he met with Churchill in Newfoundland in August 1941. The uniting symbolism of religion was a theme of American politicians from the Founding on. Those on the liberal left could identify with Jefferson’s use of religious language even while holding to a radical theology — the philosophers of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity all spoke of the usefulness of religion for holding a nation together, on the most practical of terms.
But in the American left’s lurch into neo-Jacobinism, that has been tossed out the window. The formulators of the new creed believe that all the old narratives, especially the deepest ones, the uniting religious narratives, were all instruments of oppression, meant to generate false consciousness and complacency in order to facilitate exploitation. The religions suppressed sexual nonconformists, suppressed women, suppressed free thinking. Good riddance to all that, say today’s neo-Jacobins. Throw it all out and wipe the slate clean.
And yet now, as the nihilism of their attack on narratives overtakes them, and as Hobbes’ war of everyone against everyone looms, they rediscover the necessity of at least latching on to a religious story that has given practical service over the centuries. If it enables power, why not?
But in their new-found appreciation for being part of an age-old narrative, they seem to have dropped every moral stand they took in making their case against America’s old religious tradition.
Hate the patriarchy? No problem with the entirely male government of Iran.
Concern for women’s rights? They embrace a regime that shoots women in the streets by the thousands for opposing being coerced into religious dress. They fawn over the orgiastic mass rape and sexual torture of October 7 as if it were Woodstock Nation instead of the dawning of the Age of Nefarious. They seem unfazed by the many reports of the rape of virgin women before they are hanged, because they believe virgins go to heaven.
Concern for sexual nonconformists? They embrace the regimes that torture and kill them.
Concern for coerced thinking and expression? They embrace the regime that placed a fatwa on the head of a Nobel laureate Muslim author, condemning him to death, and succeeding in blinding his eye and forcing him to hide like a witness under protection. They shut down the internet at will and they persecute or execute nonconforming religionists like the Bahai.
Perhaps the greatest uniting idea of the Left has been their pretension to be the leader in the fight against re-emergent Nazism. But this too means nothing except for its use in attaining power. We see how under the influence of the uniting story of the power-worshipping Islamist sectarians, they joined them in driving forward the definitive Nazi project — the war on the Jews, first as a recognized nation, then as a people with political rights, and then for alienating them from the most basic of rights, the right to life.
There is a far better way than this to come back to the necessity of religion. Our worship is not just of the God as omnipotent, but of God as the source of all knowledge and the hidden coherence that makes thought possible. It is also of God who is always good, whose example requires us to always bind our power to benevolence.
That task humbles us, as we can see both up close and in the grand view how often we fail at that. But seeing that honestly, our civilization teaches, leads us to humility, which frees us to approach truth by shedding our prejudices and ego. Our civilization knows religion that sees itself, allied with science and philosophy, teaching how we can humble ourselves before truth in all its forms, learning how to uncover that which is hidden under the opaque shell of egotism in all its forms, and to see the wondrousness of this world and the blessings it contains that wait for us to labor for them and to harvest them. It is a religion that honors humanity’s striving to know itself and know from where we have sprung and what underlies us even in all our differences.
America led the world in placing religion beyond the reach of governmental interference. It did so precisely because this gave religion its greatest power: to address the core of the human soul without coercion and so to create a firm foundation for freedom in every other part of life — thought, politics, economy, and more. A religion that respects differences even as it shows our constitutional unity under one God.
Religion in this American tradition deserves to be center stage in our celebration of America’s 250th year.
READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:
Higher Law and Human Law: The Religious Roots of American Freedom